Blog tour: The Seed Vault by H. B. Viegas
This post is part of a blog tour organised by ZooLoo’s Book Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘The year is 2131. Farming is dead. Hunger is rising. New Food offers humanity’s only chance of survival.
‘On a group of Nordic islands ruled by an all-seeing AI, the daughter of a gifted food scientist goes missing.
‘Axel Jóhannsson, a cynical Finder, is hired to track her down.
‘But as he digs deeper, Axel uncovers a dark secret within the high-security walls of the Svalbard seed vault.’
The Seed Vault, by H. B. Viegas, is set at two points in the future: 2131 and 2149.
By 2131, Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and Greenland have banded together to form a new kingdom named Uskania. Its citizens are part of USK, an AI model that tracks and surveils them and determines what resources they’re entitled to, based on utilitarian principles. Farmland has given way to reforestation, and people eat New Food, created in labs by monopolist corporation Mondo.
The island of Fyr is particularly attractive to societal drop-outs who nonetheless remain connected to USK; freethinkers who have voluntarily removed the tech that tethered them; and climate and war refugees who aren’t permitted to join the model, predicated as it is on a particular population size and composition. Those without tech, and therefore outside of the model, are known as “voids”.
It’s also home to Birgit, a food scientist living in a commune and working on a mysterious project for Mondo, and seven-year-old Hildr, whom Birgit took in as a baby after discovering her alone on the shore. When Hildr goes missing without the bracelet that contains her chip and tracker, Birgit engages Axel, who specialises in locating voids. However, Birgit herself soon departs for a work trip to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and then the still-connected citizens of Fyr are suddenly jettisoned from the model…
In 2149, a young woman turns up on the outcast island of Fyr and makes her way to a rebel farm – which is led by a former housemate of Birgit’s – asserting that she’s Hildr and she’s looking for her bracelet, as it contains important messages sent to her by Birgit. Her search takes her from there to Spitsbergen, where Axel now lives, and then the seed vault. But can anyone be sure Hildr is who she claims to be? What are Mondo up to inside the seed vault? And what became of Birgit?
The Seed Vault certainly has a lot going on! As well as the vision of the future the author has created, and all that entails, there’s the mystery surrounding Hildr, Birgit, and the seed vault itself, complete with cryptic communications and red herrings.
Viegas intersperses the story with short news articles and excerpts from other documents and media, giving you relevant context as and when needed, rather than overwhelming you with background information, and this is very effective and helpful.
She also succeeds in making you feel tense and uneasy throughout. For one thing, I wouldn’t like to live in this world where people are constantly monitored and told what to do, society-level decisions are made by a pragmatic, utilitarian AI, and some people are purposely genetically engineered and schooled to work maintaining the algorithm.
As a relatively plain eater who’s never really gone in for cooking as anything other than a necessary chore to be got over with, I’m probably less put-off by the concept of New Food than a lot of people would be, but the absence of choice between “old” and New Food would get my back up all the same, I think.
The three principal characters also contribute to this discomfiting feel. While interesting and engaging, none of them are all that likeable or trustworthy: Axel is a misogynistic, violent brute; Birgit is a little too single-minded and focussed on her work; and you can’t trust Hildr’s motives. It’s not all doom and gloom, though – there is relief in innocuous, straightforward secondary characters such as caring Bas, sunny Pat, and jolly Santiago.
Without giving too much away, this book’s ending isn’t neat and tidy. I loved finding out what Birgit/Mondo’s big secret was, and how it was already having noticeable effects. It was highly realistic that this discovery by a tiny number of people didn’t make the splash it truly deserved. However, I reckon I would have come away feeling more satisfied if there had been closure on more of the characters’ stories.
The Seed Vault is a sophisticated, tense, and unsettling speculative novel.
